Culinary themed rummy style card game inspiring gamers to get in the kitchen and cooks to level up

Too Many Chefs is a culinary based rummy style card game which I’ve had on the back burner for a bit but super stoked to rehash now.

Raiding the pantry with friends, Too Many Chefs challenges players to devise five delicious dishes based on 250 ingredient cards, laying out menu books for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and a midnight snack before they can “go-out” to end a round. Ingredients are pulled from the draw pile or rummaged from the pantry (discard pile). Each game is entirely unique since players name not just the dish they are making but also how they would prepare it.A three card combination of corn meal, pork and tomatoes could be played “Sliced pork loin on polenta medallions with a tomato ragout” OR “Pork tamales with spicy salsa” OR something elegantly simple like “corn-dogs with ketchup” The object of Too Many Chefs is to create a full day of delectable meals from ingredient cards including dessert and midnight snack. You can expand your own recipes or play off your opponents designing signature dishes for more points. Be the 1st player to reach 100 to win or be voted to head chef by fellow foodies and you win. Too Many Chefs challenges players to get creative with their ingredients and with luck game play translates back into the kitchen inspiring real life menu and recipe design.

Big thanks to my buddy Thomas Webb for the art design work. Outside of being a fantastic fine artist, he’s our favorite DM. More examples of Thomas’s work can be seen here.

Want to learn more or demo play? I’ll be play testing Too Many Chefs at the DU Arcade Games Expo on April 23rd in Denver Colorado. Can’t make it to Denver? Send me an email or tweet and we’ll figure something out

Hands down, my favorite project this spring was a custom job for Blue Isle Studios creating 60 hand made journals as press kits for their release of Slenderman the Arrival on Xbox 360 and PS3. My client wanted each book to feel like a special discovery, a chronicle of events and clues in the game and expansion of the narrative back story for many of the characters. Along with notes and pages that players need to collect during game play, I included photo “sightings” of Slenderman from internet memes, clippings from forums, original photography and easter eggs like QR codes on a doctor’s stationary which led back to the game site and a phone number on the inside of a matchbook for a very creepy voice mail account.

The thing which makes Slenderman so interesting to me is how he came into being, created by unaffiliated authors, bloggers and filmmakers, a crowd sourced child of the internet and collective ghost story. If you aren’t fully up on his origins check out his wikipedia entry or even more fun the Slenderman Wiki on Creepy Pasta. Creating real tangible things from fictional characters is exactly the kind of job I love doing and a great follow up project to the work I did for the Dragon Eternity game release last year.

To make the books feel authentic I used different types of photo paper and distressing techniques to age many of the pictures. Many of the letters I wrote by hand, which was a bit nuts but really added to the feeling of legitimacy with the whole piece. The Escapist did an awesome re-cap of the copy they received and went through all the pages of the journal here .

Since many of the documents were supposedly sourced from different authors I needed to come up with several different types of handwriting which was trickier than I’d anticipated. Fortunately it wasn’t to hard to talk the kids into helping and my daughter was all over the idea of leaving mud smeared hand prints on the book covers. Aging the books themselves was actually the 1st thing I did to the journals, throwing them into my dryer in batches of 10 at a time along with wet towels. The noise was horrible, but I got clean towels out of the deal so that was an unexpected bonus.

Creating fake news clippings was definitely a creative challenge. The game designers did an awesome job including old papers in the game but the images were created in photoshop and only exist in virtual environments. To make these into real pages with the look and feel of newsprint I copied the stories onto kids drawing paper sketch pads, the dark recycled paper that you might find at the Dollar Store, then printed real news stories on the backside and finally crumpled the pages. There are also a number of burned notes in the book which were also fun to recreate. I tried actually burning a few notes but the look wasn’t consistent and some of the pages burned entirely. It definitely wasn’t a process that made sense to duplicate 60 times. Instead I found some burned paper images on line and doctored them in photoshop superimposing my hand written text on top and then went through some time consuming work of cutting the burned edges, the results were super cool. Though I don’t have a picture of it here…

In one level of the game players run through the woods collecting eight notes which have been left behind on trees and buildings. Rather than duplicate those notes individually I made one copy of each and staged them in photographs in the woods by my house, at night. This part of the job was super fun and super creepy all at once. My husband helped out by holding flashlights and moving branches around and keeping me from getting too spooked out, because you never know who might be right behind you….

]]>http://www.twobeeindustries.com/dont-look-back-its-slenderman/feed/0Fictional Realist- Aren’t we all?http://www.twobeeindustries.com/fictional-realist-arent-we-all/
http://www.twobeeindustries.com/fictional-realist-arent-we-all/#respondWed, 02 Jul 2014 20:08:40 +0000http://www.twobeeindustries.com/?p=240I have a hard time explaining what I “do” for a living since my work is really a whole mess of creative projects loosely connected through a common thread of writing, art, whimsy, humor and an exploration of creativity often in group settings. Fairly frequently these projects are based on a fictional narrative- either something I’ve created like the pulp fiction voice, Miss Demeanor of my craft book or making real objects from fictional stories like the Sonic Screwdriver workshops based on Dr. Who or press kits for Dragon Eternity and Slenderman digital games. Loosing oneself into a character is a truly liberating experience for an artist- Under the self imposed guise of an alternate reality I find myself creating and envisioning things through their imagined eyes, they tend to get away a whole lot more than I do.

My latest project is a whole new gig for me, writing a tabletop card game- this one will be based on food and cooking. While it’s a step away from the fictional world, it’s still really rooted in collaborative storytelling with a group, building off one and other’s creative processes and a thoughtful examination of everyday rituals in a fresh perspective.

During the winter of 2013 I hosted a series of Steampunk inspired workshops for the Multnomah County Library system visiting several branches. Youth and adult participants made metal “Admiral Pins” from recycled cans, paper elements and mechanical ephemera.

A second project was available as well, Steampunk Travel Journals- a small DIY zine which featured lists of Portland hot spots for shopping, kraken watching, maker spaces and places to get your gears lubed.

Along with the course materials, I developed a reading list of books within the genera from the Parasol Protectorate to HG Wells Time Machine. Bringing further literacy discussion into the workshop I outlined the history of the movement and it’s effects on art, film and pop culture.